PETIT CHAMPS DES MORTS, PERA.       133

while the sex of the dead may be at once distinguished by the turban (varying in form according to the rank of the deceased, and faithfully serving as the index to his social position) which marks the grave of the man, and the sculptured rose-branch that indicates the resting-place of the female.

Nothing can be more marked than the contrast between the Turkish and the Christian burial-grounds. The Greek cemetery at Pera is slovenly and ill kept; the slabs covering the bodies are mutilated and defaced by wanton violence; the trees, scantily distributed among them, are hacked and ragged; and were it not that it is on three of its sides overlooked by houses, it would present the very embodyment of desolation.

The Frank grave-yard is as obnoxious to good taste as that of the Greeks to good feeling. There are Latin inscriptions, signifying nothing which can awaken either sympathy or devotion; flourishes of French sentiment in prose and rhyme; injunctions to pray for the souls of the departed, coupled with Italian elaborations of eulogy and despair; concise English records of births, ages, deaths, and diseases; and all the common-places of an ordinary grave-yard, without a single object which can tend to deepen a solemn or a pious thought.

But the Armenian necropolis is well worthy the attention of the stranger. It is a thickly peopled spot, where the acacia-trees blossom in their scented beauty, and shed their withered flowers, like a sweet pall dropped by the hand of nature on the quiet graves. The Armenian tombs are peculiarly inscribed, giving you a lesson, and reading you a homily as you wander among them. The noble Armenian character is graven deeply into the stone; name and date are duly set forth; but that which renders these slabs (for there is not an upright head-stone in any Eastern cemetery, save those of the Turks and Jews) peculiarly distinctive, is the singular custom observed by this people, of graving upon the tomb an emblem f the profession or trade of the deceased.

Thus the priest is distinguished even beyond the grave by the mitre that surmounts his name; the diamond-merchant by a group of ornaments; the money-changer by a pair of scales; the florist by a knot of flowers: besides many more ignoble hieroglyphics, such as the razor an basin of the barber, the shears of the tailor, and so on; and when the calling is one which may have been followed by either sex, a book, placed immediately above the appropriate emblem, distinguishes the grave of the man.

Nor is this all; for the victims of a violent death have also their distinctive mark; and more than one tomb in this extraordinary burial-place presents the rude representation of a headless trunk, from whose severed throat the gushing blood is spirting upwards like a fountain, while the head itself is pillowed on the clasped hands!